Dust quotes
1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"I am the dust in the sunlight, I am the ball of the sun . . . I am the mist of morning, the breath of evening . . . . I am the spark in the stone, the gleam of gold in the metal . . . . The rose and the nightingale drunk with its fragrance. I am the chain of being, the circle of the spheres, The scale of creation, the rise and the fall. I am what is and is not . . . I am the soul in all."
"I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies."
"Take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again."
"It is true that we are made of dust. And the world is also made of dust. But the dust has motes rising."
"Our lives are but specks of dust falling through the fingers of time. Like sands of the hourglass, so are the days of our lives."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside dust — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being."
"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."
"Faith. Trust. and Pixie Dust."
"Become dust - and they will throw thee in the air; Become stone - and they will throw thee on glass."
"Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won."
"The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust."
"In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality."
"Whoever is truly humbled — will not be easily angry, nor harsh or critical of others. He will be compassionate and tender to the infirmities of his fellow-sinners, knowing that if there is a difference — it is grace alone which has made it! He knows that he has the seeds of every evil in his own heart. And under all trials and afflictions — he will look to the hand of the Lord, and lay his mouth in the dust, acknowledging that he suffers much less than his iniquities have deserved."
"I think Robert F. Kennedy really, finally, cared; he realized that all of the rhetoric had to be put down into some form of action. That's perhaps the reason they killed him. They don't care what you say, you can say as much as you want to, provided you don't do anything. If you start to do something and your shuffling raises too much dust, they will disestablish you. That's what happened to Martin Luther King."
"Ash Wednesday is full of joy...The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust."
"We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust."
"History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?"
"The glories of our blood and state, Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against fate, Death lays his icy hand on kings. Scepter and crown must tumble down, And, in the dust, be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade."
"Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble."
"We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam"
"When you hear the splash Of the water drops that fall Into the stone bowl You will feel that all the dust Of your mind is washed away."
"You think of yourself as a citizen of the universe. You think you belong to this world of dust and matter. Out of this dust you have created a personal image, and have forgotten about the essence of your true origin"
"The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched."
"This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
"Those who know don't talk. Those who talk don't know. Close your mouth, block off your senses, blunt your sharpness, untie your knots, soften your glare, settle your dust. This is the primal identity. Be like the Tao. It can't be approached or withdrawn from, benefited or harmed, honored or brought into disgrace. It gives itself up continually. That is why it endures."
